Like us on Facebook

The Time Is Ripe

Kick-start your resolutions with the Pomodoro Technique

It’s been six days. What do you mean you have yet to walk to work and make gluten-free bread from scratch? Face it: We all need some help with New Year’s resolutions.

Luckily, we’ve found a nifty trick for curbing that ol’ procrastination habit. Introducing the Pomodoro Technique.

The Pomodoro Technique teaches you to be more effective with your time by splitting cumbersome tasks into 25-minute increments.

The idea is that you can tackle any big job if you break it up into digestible pieces and the people behind Pomodoro have found that 25 minutes is the golden span of attention. After 25 minutes of work (called a “pomodoro”), you treat yourself to a five-minute break and keep on that cycle (25 minutes on, five minutes off) until the project in question is complete.

We recently tried the method while working on a PureWow story (sneak peek into the life of an editor). After downloading a Pomodoro app, we hit start and ended up working for two pomodoros in a row, which entitled us to a 10-minute coffee break. It’s astonishing how much you actually get done when you’re forced to stay focused--in our case, nailing the first three paragraphs without so much as glancing at our Twitter feed.

Ideally, the more you use this technique and learn how long various to-dos will take you, the more you’ll be able to plan your day based on 25-minute pomodoros. Our advice? Use it for big tasks, like that stack of thank-you notes or your impending dissertation (smarty pants).